A Pinch of Time

by Claude Tatilon

  They both lived near the Old Port and took the tramway together to the square Joseph-Étienne, then climbed the Rue des Lices slope and the long Rue Chaix staircase. Raymond always arrived out of breath due to his pneumothorax. But that didn’t stop him from picking me up by the armpits as soon as he arrived, holding me at arm’s length and asking, “How are you, kid?” Since he was the only one who couldn’t kiss me, that was his way of showing affection. His red face radiated kindness, his deep-set eyes kept a youthful glint, and the smile that displayed his overly long teeth should have scared me, but instead it would turn up the sides of his lips and give him a humorous look. Even though at that time I was as “long as a day without bread” (Grandma Rose always used that expression), the effort that Raymond made picking up my twenty kilos exacerbated the whistle of his locomotive breathing. My father would always tell him, “Don’t do that, Momon! Your doctor told you not to expend unnecessary energy.” He’d answer with a shrug of his shoulders and a broad smile. Once – and it’s remained etched in my memory – he answered while gasping for breath, “Unnecessary? What’s unnecessary? This is Life, Paul… that I’m holding in my arms.” Those weak arms worried me the most; I was afraid they would break under my weight.

  But that day, Caraco was alone.

  “What about Raymond?”

  “He isn’t well. Tomorrow he goes back to the clinic. They’re going to try a new medication that’s supposed to be really effective. It’s called streptomycin…”

  “He’s going back to hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Won’t he come back to see us?”

  “Yes, later, when he’s better.”

  My father’s answer did nothing to reassure me. I could hear the lack of conviction in his voice.

  That night was like any other night under the stars. Besides my father and Caraco, Little Pierre was there, always the first to arrive since he lived next door on Rue du Coteau. François Le Grava was there, with Jo the Goï and Fred. That night, they mostly spoke of Raymond.

  Le Grava told how they’d almost gotten into a fight when the doctor had assigned this greenhorn to a mission with our Robin Hood – the type he preferred to execute alone. He’d spoken some hurtful words to the inexperienced young whippersnapper who still had peach fuzz on his cheeks. Raymond was barely eighteen in 1943 – twelve years younger than Le Grava. It made no sense to go in broad daylight with a beginner to a rail yard full of boxcars – and soldiers – to take stickers off train cars that read “Sisteron lamb for Munich” and “Brignoles bauxite for Düsseldorf” or into the middle of the city to blow up electrical pylons and transformers. But the doctor knew what he was doing. And in the end, Le Grava couldn’t speak highly enough of the kid full of courage and determination. It was the beginning of a solid, sincere but much too short friendship.

  Then my father told of that horrible scene in Dachau. The camp had just been liberated by American troops, and ghosts were rummaging through every part of it, searching for food and “interesting” objects abandoned by the Nazis. My father laughed at his own foolishness. Like many others, he filled a large bag: cameras, pistols, daggers, badges… But the bag was too heavy for his frail body, stricken by typhus, and his treasure proved too heavy to carry. No sooner had he finished gathering up his loot than he had to abandon it.

  A few minutes later, exhausted, he was leaning against a wall with Raymond near their Block. Sitting a couple metres away, a Russian prisoner was attempting to open a can with a screwdriver. The contents of the can had moved when he’d shaken it, and he thought there might be soup or fruit juice inside. Raymond was able to read the label: Tischlerleim. “Damn! It’s glue!” He ran to the starving man and tried to explain his mistake to him. But the Russian misinterpreted his intentions, figuring Raymond wanted to take his treasure away. Raymond insisted, doing all he could to explain the situation, just as the other man managed to open the lid.

  It came to fists. A bit of glue ran down Raymond’s arm; it had a good almond smell. The Russian was much stronger than his presumed aggressor. He put down the can but still held the screwdriver. Not too fast on his feet, Raymond came near to meeting his end. Like a St. Bernard mixed with a pit bull, he refused to give up his dangerous mission, and my father had a hard time separating him from the man who had no intention of being robbed.

  The Russian calmed down and returned to his spot, where he wolfed down what he thought was a godsend with small moans of pleasure. Resigned, the two friends could only watch him sink into fatal gluttony.

  His guts couldn’t take the meal. He died half an hour later in horrible intestinal pain. Raymond held him in his arms, his eyes full of compassion, and accompanied him to the distant border of his ancestral Siberia. “That’s how Momon is: determined, courageous, generous…” my father spoke.

  He would use those same epithets a week later, on September 22nd, but in a sentence spoken in the past tense. It was in front of Raymond’s tombstone. I too wanted to accompany him with the others to his final resting place. Along the walkways of the cemetery where my grandmother held my hand, each of us followed the ceremony with heads bent to hide our tears.

  Raymond’s shade threw a shroud over the heavens. The boys lost their taste for jokes. The season of starry nights on Rose and Henriette’s terrace would end long before the first cold days of autumn.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Much later, in our private moments, my father took to being rather sparing in his confidences, and I was reluctant to question him about his past suffering. Yet one day, when his doctor had just advised him to have an operation on his injured leg – rebreaking the tibia, realigning it, then a simple ablation of the meniscus, nothing out of the ordinary – he admitted that, in the camps, that injury had been ceaseless torture. “It was painful, believe me. Especially mornings, when I had to get up. Then once we started walking, there was no way to slow down and rest. Not being able to keep up meant the death penalty, for inability to work.” A bullet in the back of the neck; the stragglers were left on the side of the road. “More than once the boys held me up… they put me back on my own two feet.” Then he winked. As a typical man of Marseille, he loved word play, even the weak kind – especially when it thumbed its nose at death. “At night, the same show, different time… When I could finally lie down and try to forget the day’s horrors, I wouldn’t find peace for long. Rare were the nights when my leg didn’t poison my sleep. Once I was asleep, the blows, the fatigue, it would all return and make me suffer again, nightmares more real than life. Not to mention the parasites and the numerous skin ailments – scabies, erysipelas, impetigo, prurigo, eczema…”

  Then my father would fall silent. I remembered the images from back on the Marseille terrace. Did he have a bed? You couldn’t call it that. A blanket that was never changed, never washed, a meagre mattress filled with wood chips that had turned to dust eons ago. Regular parasite nests – lice, bedbugs, acaroids of every kind. Even some rather bizarre ones like the “Adolf bug,” so named for the swastika-shaped stripes in the centre of its chitinous armour. At lights out, all those crawlers would be ready to go, sharpening formidable weapons – darts, stingers, mandibles, hooks. They would begin their conquest of the hosts they found to be the tenderest of meats and in whose folds of skin they would find cover until the first light of day.

  Then, joking, my father would add, “You know, in the end, the German that stole my basil and my Parmesan when we were arrested couldn’t have imagined the favour he was doing me. Though I went hungry, those two simple ingredients continued to exist in my mind, and my imagination multiplied them. Like Christ and the loaves and fishes. They made dozens of delicious pistous, smooth and flavourful. I offered them to whoever asked. Even Eugène wouldn’t have refused.”

  In their starved hallucinations, each of them had their favourite meal. I can remember Little Pierre’s performance, one night on the terrace. He told us that his trick was to mime the devouring of a steak cooked to perfection. Th
is demonstration followed: with his thumb and index finger well parted, his left hand hefted the lovely thickness of the slab of meat. Then, with the skill of a matador, his right hand impaled it with a fork – “made of finest Toledo steel,” he added, thrusting out his chest with all the dignity of a Spanish hidalgo. He followed up with his knife, which sliced through the meat like butter. “The meat is tender,” he declared, in case we hadn’t understood, then cut off a huge piece. His fork delivered it to his gaping mouth and snap! It closed. His jaw went into action then: a meticulous mastication that deformed the flexible contour of his face. His temples beat like a heart – diastole, systole. His gullet went up and down with a gourmand’s deglutition, eyes half-closed. After patting the corners of his mouth with his napkin, he recovered his usual face. Then, of course, the exaggerated sigh: “Aaaaah…” End of scene. Eugène laughed heartily in appreciation. Encore!

  Masochism is often a source of pleasure.

  My dad’s been gone for more than twenty years. Of all the boys he fought alongside, the only one to have made it to the new millennium is Little Pierre, today a young octogenarian.

  He still lives in Marseille, and I always visit him when I’m there. Still loves the theatre just as much, and just like my father, he too balks at evoking the dark years.

  After those nights during the summer of 1945, the boys still wanted to participate in the official commemorations, chests thrust out under the heavy collection of medals, mirroring the rays of the sun. They worked within their beloved FNDIR (the National Federation for Deportees and Internees of the Résistance) to preserve the memory of their comrades who had died for the country. Yet, privately, the time to discuss their own sacrifices was past. They’d had the terrace to speak the unspeakable to those who could understand. Now, there was forgetting.

  Until the day when Pierre, nearly forty years later, shortly after my father’s death…

  “This is for you, Dominique. I found it at the Federation when I was working in the archives.”

  I immediately recognized the writing, spiked like an electrocardiogram. These were notes scribbled down on Hôtel Lutetia letterhead.

  “It’s my father! Can I keep them?”

  “You may. I’ve made a photocopy. It’s his itinerary. It’s also Raymond’s and mine. After Fresnes, we were never separated, the three of us.”

  “What about the doctor?”

  “The doctor, Christian, and François – and Alexandre too – hooked up with us in Buchenwald, a few months later. That’s where we met Caraco. In Dachau, our last stop, only eight of us from the original cell were left… We knew about Christian through his father. As for the others – Borel, Bonnet, Autran – we knew nothing.”

  Paris, June 7, 1945

  On November 29, 1943, after a few months stay in the Fresnes prison, I was transferred to the Neue Bremm camp in Sarrebruck. Pierre and Raymond are in the same convoy. As we exit the train, there’s about forty of us boys chained two by two and packed in a prison car, urged along by blows from the guards’ cudgels. Arrive at the camp after a half-hour ride.

  A small, dreadful place. Daily diet: 1 litre of foul-tasting herb soup and 100 grams of some viscous black bread. Daily entertainment: after the morning roll call that can last hours, we must jog around a basin, then crawl several metres in the mud, then walk while squatting with our hands behind our heads, under a shower of blows from a bullwhip My leg is horribly painful. The stragglers are clubbed to death.

  We’re transferred to Buchenwald in the heart of winter. Long ride in cattle cars. At arrival, sent to disinfection. Being dunked, head and all, in a bathtub filled with purple-blue water that has permanganate poured in. Dressed in rags afterwards: the striped pajama is reserved for transport and work outside the camp. Then sent to the Quarantine Block. We find the doctor, Christian, Sandre, and François there… together with an eccentric, Ludovic Caraco.

  During quarantine, every day, after interminable roll calls (many die of the cold), we leave for the quarry, two kilometres away. We each take a rock weighing several kilograms that we bring back to the camp. Time and time again. At the end of day, we suffer through a grotesque inspection: paraded nude in front of an SS who turns us every which way with the tip of his rod, looking for lice. Then, time out in the Block, packed like animals, sleeping on bunks crawling with vermin.

  We stay several months in Buchenwald. I work at the station with Raymond, unloading cars filled with glass wool and loading them with coal. Many comrades die of exposure.

  In July 1944, transferred to Natzwiller-Struthof camp in Alsace, together with Pierre, Raymond, and Sandre. Confined to Block 14, which belongs to the NNs. Meet up with Armand and Berthier. Each day, we break rocks, dig ditches, transport large wheelbarrows full of earth over many metres: many die of exhaustion. Comrades from the Alliance cell who were in the Schirmeck camp a few kilometres from ours are brought to Struthof and hung on hooks in a room adjacent to the crematory ovens. We wait our turn. Not yet: faced with the advancing Allied army, the camp is quickly evacuated. Saved in extremis from a horrible death.

  In September, we are evacuated once again, this time to Dachau. Packed in cattle cars, 120, 140 men in each. Many suffocate.

  Soon enough, we are sent in a Kommando to Freiburg. Leave at six in the morning, come back at six at night. Several kilometres to reach our workplace. My leg, always…

  A few weeks later, typhus appears in the camp. We are sent in February 1945 to Vaihingen, near Stuttgart.

  In March, evacuation again: de Lattre is at Stuttgart’s doors. Back to Dachau. Always the godforsaken cattle cars: two-day trip, many don’t make it. Christian dies.

  In the camp, we are saved due to a providential coal shortage. Armand dies in our arms.

  April 29th. Finally liberated by the Americans! Those who have typhus (Pierre, Raymond, Sandre, and I) are quarantined in the camp’s SS barracks. Still, many die, despite our liberators’ care.

  June 2nd. Repatriated to Paris and sent to the Hôtel Lutetia. Maguy, Ange and Georges still alive, eleven of us at the Lutetia!

  TWENTY-NINE

  When I took Nela to Moustiers for the first time, five years ago, I hadn’t set foot there myself in more than twenty-five years. Not since I’d moved to Toronto. We wanted to visit Antoine first. The Audibert family has been making faience from one generation to the next for just about forever, and the Riou Workshop where Gérard and I used to have carte blanche was one of the most fascinating places of our childhood.

  These days, with expressways that run almost half the distance, the village is only about an hour’s ride from Marseille. We left right after lunch and arrived near the village in early afternoon.

  Past Riez, right after a turn, Moustiers-Sainte-Marie appears suddenly, nestled between the rocks, with its tile roofs in tight rows like an army ready to conquer the mountain along the break in its rock face.

  “A real postcard! It reminds me a little of the village of Monchique in the Algarve. We’ve never been there together. When I was a little girl, we spent our summers there with my cousins.”

  I had the same feeling. A distant signal warned me I was entering the land of my childhood.

  Better than a postcard: an authentic masterpiece, in contrasts, painted with a palette knife, with thick slabs of colour. A canvas on which all the details have been chosen and orchestrated to celebrate the great festival of colours and lines with a maximum of plasticity and radiant intensity.

  Ah, the colours. The yellow and ochre of the rocks breaking into the bright blue of the sky. The green smudges of vegetation – from the deepest green, a bouquet of cypress and yew surrounding a small chapel perched over the village, to the brilliant green of the prairie in the foreground; but also the silver-tinged green of the olive trees that stipple the surrounding slopes. Then comes the steel grey of a line of willow and poplar trees that cross sideways through the lower part of the painting.

  The lines, then. A few curves, mostly verticals rushing to
ward the sky like prayers. A broken line at the very top triumphs: the rocky crest, collapsed in the middle, its peak seemingly cut with a billhook.

  Sometimes a landscape can speak for the state of your soul.

  “Let’s stop a moment.”

  I stopped the car on the side of the road, right next to a young fig tree that gladly offered us its sweet-smelling fruit (Nela loves figs). Less subtle were its neighbours, a shrub of broom and a tuft of lavender that sent their intoxicating perfumes pouring over us.

  At that very moment, having come close enough during the drive, in the centre of the landscape, we saw the star suspended on its chain, pulling together the two sides of the mountain.

  We started down on the road again. A first kilometre, lined with willow and poplar. Another, with chestnut trees. Then another still, shaded by almond trees and subtly scented lindens.

  We negotiated the last hairpin curve – look, the still is gone, but the tall walnut tree hasn’t moved – and the last straight line that brought us to the village square where it was easy to park since the tourists hadn’t shown up yet. No one on the square: the village was heavy with sleep. Alone on the bridge that leads to the square stood an old man, hands in his pockets, eyes lost in the distance. We stopped a few metres away so as not to trouble his meditation and leaned on the balustrade to silently contemplate the stream tumbling down the deep ravine.

  We went in search of a hotel and chose the Belvédère, less for its attractive menu with the Michelin star that was posted by the door than for its position on the edge of the rocky spur.

  “Room number 3.” From our room, the view was extraordinary, broader still than the one from the bridge. The same view that, ages ago, we had from the small upstairs room. We gazed at the impressive panorama, decorated with lush purple waves – it would be another two months before the lavender would be ready for harvesting – all the way to the bluish hills of the horizon. These days, there were no fighter planes in the sky.